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Pentagon Alerts Millions of Service Members After Months-Long Personnel Records Breach
The Department of Defense has begun notifying millions of current and former U.S. military personnel that their personal data was stolen in a breach of Pentagon personnel records that ran for several months. Roughly 2.
A notification issued by the Defense Manpower Data Center states that several unauthorized users exploited a security vulnerability in an unspecified file-sharing system, with access spanning from October 2025 to mid-July 2026.
The exposed personally identifiable information includes Social Security numbers as well as names, dates of birth, sex, race and other details about an individual's military service. The notice says the personnel records involved were not encrypted.
The scope is unusually large. A Pentagon official put the number of affected living people at about 2.8 million, with close to 300,000 additional records belonging to people who are deceased. By comparison, the U.S. military had 1.3 million active service members as of March.
Department of Defense spokesperson Susan Gough confirmed the number of those affected in an emailed statement. She did not address questions about whether U.S. officials had received any communications from the hackers, whose identities have not been established.
The incident is the latest in a string of thefts involving federal workers' data in recent months.